Navigating Feedback on Your Speeches

On the journey to becoming the 2018 World Champion of Public Speaking, Ramona J. Smith received a lot of feedback on her speeches. She welcomed it. “I wouldn’t be the speaker I am without feedback,” she says.

Smith, a member of Post Oak Toastmasters, an online club, says it’s vital for all speakers to receive feedback. “It’s just like when you sing in the shower and you think you sound like Mariah Carey, but you really sound like Mariah Scary,” she says. “Others can see things we might not see.”

Feedback on the content and delivery of your speeches is essential to speaker growth. It can help you strengthen your skills, increase self-awareness, and gain ideas for making a greater impact.

Setting Yourself Up for Success

Speaker feedback is fundamental to the Toastmasters program. There’s an evaluation for every prepared speech in Pathways and a Level 1 “Evaluation and Feedback” project in each path. The Level 1 assignment helps speakers identify effective feedback and learn how to apply it. Some clubs even offer evaluations on Table Topics®.

Before you give a speech, it’s important to set yourself up for success to receive the best feedback to help you improve. As a speaker, here are five ways you can set the stage for an effective evaluation:

1. Know your goal. Like Smith, Mariana Dachova, DTM, from Silver & Wiser Toastmasters, an online club, finds feedback essential for speaker growth. She advocates starting with your speech’s goal. “Speeches always need to have a purpose,” she says.
   Do you want to entertain, persuade, educate, or inspire? What is your core message? How would you like the audience to feel and what are you hoping they do after your speech? Knowing your speech’s goals can help you focus on the type of feedback that will be helpful to achieve them.
   
   
2. Welcome feedback. Dachova receives evaluations with an open mind and heart. “I always assume the person evaluating me is doing so with the intent to help me grow,” she says.
   Cat Kipling, DTM, from Berkeley Square Speakers Toastmasters Club in London, says, “A past member used to say, ‘Feedback is a gift.’ Of course, we don’t always get gifts we want.”
   Yet sometimes those same gifts are what we need. When speaking, it’s important to be open, grateful for, and accepting of people’s opinions, even if you don’t agree with them. “Look at it as an opportunity to reflect,” Kipling says.
   
   
3. Pay attention to the positive. Dale Anne Clark (formerly Rees-Bevan), DTM, AS, is also a fan of feedback. She believes speakers need to pay more attention to the positive feedback they receive.
   “For me, 90% of my growth and leveling up has come from people saying ‘Do you realize you did this? That’s the sort of thing you need to do more of. That’s where you’re really hitting it with the audience,’” says Clark, a member of Dural Toastmasters Club in Sydney, Australia. Oftentimes speakers aren’t aware of their strengths or effective tactics they’ve used. They may not continue using certain approaches if they don’t understand how effective they are.
   Clark believes focusing on positive feedback can be more meaningful—not just because it’s encouraging, but also because it’s specific to the speaker. “I think it’s powerful because quite often our strengths and the positive things we’re doing are individual, whereas the points for building are generic,” she says.
   
   
4. Talk with your evaluator. You can also maximize your evaluation experience by talking with your evaluator before speaking. Ask for concrete examples about your speech’s positive achievements, including what worked and why. Share the areas you’re working on and ask the evaluator to provide specific feedback on those too.
   If several people are evaluating you, Clark recommends asking for general feedback. “If I ask a specific question to a group, they spend more time than needed on that and miss other things, like what’s landing or what’s being missed,” she says.
   Don’t hesitate to follow up with your evaluator after the meeting to clarify anything confusing or gain more insights. If you feel the evaluation missed the point, ask other Toastmasters for feedback to see if they have a similar perspective.
   It can also help to review your past evaluations. Are the recommendations consistent? Check for common themes and trends that can help you.

Deciding What to Incorporate

Once you’ve set the stage and given your presentation, it’s time to review your evaluation. Here are a few tips to help you decide what feedback you should incorporate into future speeches.

Make an impact. Sometimes you know right away that you’ll use an evaluator’s suggestion. For her World Championship speech, Smith’s Toastmasters mentors suggested she use the phrases “mirror of defeat” and “window of possibilities.” “When I heard them say that, I felt an ‘Aha!’ moment. Those words would make a strong impact,” says Smith.

Consider the fit. What suggestions will help you achieve your speech goals? What aligns with your vision and style? “There are certain values and traits of my personality I want to respect,” says Dachova. Her speeches are often about serious and informative topics. When she receives suggestions to add more humor, it doesn’t feel right to her. If feedback is in conflict with the core aspects of your speech or approach, don’t use it.

If you’re still figuring out your speaking style, then check your gut instinct. Do the recommendations feel right?

Navigate conflicting feedback. When you receive contradictory feedback from different members, think about message alignment, self-awareness, and what your gut is saying. The better you know yourself and your speech goals, the easier it will be to navigate opposing advice.

In 2017, when Clark was a World Championship of Public Speaking semi-finalist, she went wild with practice. She visited many clubs to fine-tune her speech, and each offered roundtable evaluation sessions involving all meeting attendees. Throughout, she received conflicting feedback.

“The message was there if I had been a mature enough speaker to sort it out,” Clark says. “Hindsight tells me I should have heard warning bells that something was not working.” Today, she’s an Accredited Speaker and would advise her past self to tighten the speech’s messaging and communicate it more succinctly.

For Smith, if the suggestion doesn’t feel right, she won’t implement it. She knows her style and what is authentic for her.

For example, she describes herself as being extremely animated. Some people have said she moves too much. Others have said, “Do your thing.” Smith says, “I’m not a speaker who will stick to the podium. I like to move. I might do a karate kick in the middle of my speech if I feel like it.”

On the other hand, Kipling, the London Toastmaster, considers herself to be a grounded speaker—someone who often stays in one place when speaking. Some evaluators have recommended she “use the stage” more. She says, “When the situation is right, I do. But I think it’s appropriate to match it with the content. For me, it’s more important to be grounded and use that power.”

Strengthen your evaluation skills. When you’re a better evaluator, you can evaluate yourself—and feedback—better. Smith recommends participating in evaluation contests.

You can also learn from other speakers’ evaluations. What did the evaluator focus on and how did it differ from your experience of the speech? What can you learn from that difference and how might it apply to your own speaking style? Noticing there’s a difference can also be a helpful reminder that an evaluation is just one person’s opinion.

Test it. Once you decide on the feedback you want to use, try it in your next speech. Kipling acts on feedback as quickly as possible. She notes it’s impossible to work on too many things at once and recommends focusing on what will make the greatest impact.

“I’m a fan of quick wins, but they’re not necessarily quick fixes,” says Kipling. “They may take a bit of time and be new habits to put in place.”

The better you know yourself and can create an environment for the most effective and meaningful feedback, the greater your self-confidence and speaking success will be. As Kipling says, “With feedback, we can all learn and grow.”

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